Ugh...

a matter of taste

I'd like to inform that the Dark Grey FL Style background image is taking AGES to load...

works fine for me.. that and the Space version are the best Styles

it takes that long because the pic is that big

i see

Notice of Departure function added to the forum
Users can now give a notice of departure on their forum profile which get displayed with time of departure, time of return and reason for departure under the members profile
departed members get displayed on the forum threads (instead of being shown online or offline) and on the forum main site (lower part)

now its possible to add attachments to posts.
max file size = 1mb
attachments get moderated so dont even think about adding tons of stupid shit

they are for supporting purpose

due to a minor incompatibility between attachments and board statistics todays activity stats have not been updated correctly

this issue has been fixed now

ehrm no that looks really unstylish, its fine as it is now

for testing purpose the forum is going to be fully open to guests in the next 2-3 weeks
if tests are going to be successful I intent to do structural changes on the forum

size of news on the SWAT frontpage limited to 1000 chars
old news imported to the forum
news script rewritten to support the new forum news sections
(that will optimize the site layout and the news submission/news posting process)

search function added to the portal site

As you might already have noticed this weekend massive updates were done to the forum and the portal site

To sum up more than 400 templates were adjusted to improve the visibility of the portal and the forum in call browsers. Huor and I tested the site with IE6, Opera9, FF2+3, IE8 and IE7 to make the sites fully compatible to those browsers. I hope that I never have to do such a crap again in my life.
The result is that tons of errors could get removed from the sites, new and old script could finally get enabled and the site is loading faster now.

Next to that the forum has a new top menu bar.
Why?
Upcoming changes require a more structured navigation on the forum. We had tons of buttons on the top and even more would have been added if we wouldnt have decided to go this way. The new menu is functional and fully dynamical connected with the forum.
It is not yet based on the forum templates so just one style is available atm but that will change.

Next to that massive updates were done on the SWAT Portal page. The old news system got completly removed. The staff got updated. SWAT Projects got added.
The affiliates got updated while serveral links had to be updated... some got removed... one got banned (the server community of our TLR friends).

Since we intent to introduce many new games to SWAT and we already had many big section bars on the left side of the portal which would have been too much when the new games get introduced we decide to create a dynamic side menu for the supported SWAT games.
This should ensure to keep the overview on the site.

Both - the forum menu and the portal menu are based on java but should also work (in a limited way when java is not active) and allows search bots to browse the site.

And finally a google translation feature has been added to the forum.

3 days work... have fun.

somehow changing back from arabic to another other language doesn't work for me...